The 13th-century fall of an obscure king into the river Euphrates, the pride of the Ottoman empire and modern Turkey and a humiliating French retreat after the 1914-18 war provide the truly Byzantine origins of Turkey’s little military operation to remove a long-dead body from the “Islamic Caliphate” this weekend. All that – and the fear that Isis forces might destroy a shrine in civil-war Syria that has been jealously guarded by Turkey since 1921.

Vladimir Putin will have much to talk about with his Egyptian counterpart, Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, and will recognise a kindred spirit in an autocratic nationalist ruler buffeted by Western criticism, writes Robert Fisk